What's new in Radiant 0.6

I’ve collected information about all the changes to Radiant in the last
250+ commits and summarized them on my blog. Please read:

http://seancribbs.com/tech/2007/04/18/whats-new-in-radiant-0-6

Sean

Andrew: neat site, loads quick too

Yep. You heard right. With your help, I’ve brought
http://www.bladedthoth.com/ online with a whole new design and under
Radiant 0.6.0rc2. It runs very well; The caching seems to work better
IMO under 0.6.0 and a lot less tempermental to set up on Dreamhost
(Though it STILL requires modifications of environment.rb and some
trickery on the behalf of the custom rubygems install.)

I’ve been messing with this behind the scenes for the better part of a
month now to get inline with my design desires as well as with the new
Radiant. What better time to do this than now as 0.6.0 is about to be
released (Or is it… Hrm… Maybe I should have waited. Heh. :slight_smile: )

Anyways, check it out and let me know how it looks please. My visitors
love it (I push about 500+ unique visitors a day right now and climbing)
and I hope you enjoy it too. Nothing that pushes the envelope like some
of what others are doing here. I’m glad I made the choice of Radiant
over all other CMSes out there.

http://www.bladedthoth.com/

Andy
(BladedThoth)

I’m new to Radiant. About one month studing it. I think that the suport
of
extensions is THE thing that makes 0.6 release a milestone in the
project.

Last week a had a talk about Rails development in FISL 8.0
(Internacional
Free Software Conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil) and I think thats my
next
talk will be about Radiant and Radiant extesions… based on your talk.

Will make me happier if I can help you make Radiant better in next
releases.

Congratulations for the good work.

Sylvestre

I was sitting here thinking; While I will never be slashdotted (Or
similar violent surge scenarios), there is a good chance that while
Radiant gains traction, that someone somewhere will end up being on the
blunt end of a slashdotting. Now, I’ve been brainstorming on ideas for
Radiant to attempt to incorporate some level of slashdotting protection,
and some I feel could be fairly easily incorporated into extensions
(Though I’m not quite daring enough to try to build an extension yet…)

Idea A: Pre-Designed ‘Thin’ site and auto-switchover

With this idea, someone would have one or multiple pre-designed layouts
which are essentially stripped-down versions of their sites which then
be applied to the pages much like how layouts are applied now. The
extension would prebuild the entire set of pages upon a ‘Cache Clear.’
– This may slow down your site, but if you suspect you may have got a
top-notch article or getting popular enough to be targetted by slashdot
or other social bombarding, may save your butt. As soon as the
extension detects in some form of either extreme-accelerated increase in
visitors per second or from common ‘sources’ of the slashdot effect, it
immediately switches over to the cached version and pulls Radiant out as
much as possible from any interaction/updates which may cripple the
process even worse.

Idea B: Ability to ‘cache’ a full-site in a different directory in html
format (Including the ability to do the above as well.)

Many hosts (Mine included) have auto-failover services where if some
reason your main install tanks or your bandwidth is accelerating at a
maddening pace, it will allow your site to roll over to another
directory structure altogether. The ability to have Radiant build a full
set of html files which work the same was as your site would in a
separate site may again be able to save some face when the slash comes
for you.

Idea C: Ability to totally disable pages or force a redirect to a
specific page.

Okay, you know you’ve JUST been slashdotted and you already see the
traffic coming (Or better yet, Idea A kicks in on its own,) You want to
be able to (or let A decide) to be able to disable an entire set of
pages except the targeted page and possibly a main home page with some
RSS feeds or similar if someone tries to visit any specific page outside
of what has been slashdotted (IE:- We’re sorry, we’re in the middle of
being slashdotted at this link - Here’s some RSS feeds for the future.).
This would be handy in deed to minimize amount of ‘wandering’ damage to
your site, taking you totally down, while hopefully retaining some of
the slashdot visitors for future visits as well by providing them a
little extra. There should be a quick and easy (AND fast) to be able to
do this.

Okay, I had this more refined in my head, but hopefully the picture is
pretty clear. I feel that a site’s worst nightmare is being slashdotted
into hell, and while I don’t know if a Ruby on Rails site or Radiant can
stand up to it, but it’d be nice to be prepared.

Andy
(BladedThoth)

I was sitting here thinking; While I will never be slashdotted (Or
similar violent surge scenarios), there is a good chance that while
Radiant gains traction, that someone somewhere will end up
being on the
blunt end of a slashdotting. Now, I’ve been brainstorming on

The wikipedia page says that the slashdot affect is somewhere from
‘several hundred through to several thousands’ requests a minute.
Radiant caching is much simplier and faster than rails caching, and my
benchmarking of a cached radiant page suggests to me that
radiant on my server should be able to deal with somewhere around 5000
hits/minutes.

I probably wouldn’t trust it past 500 hits/second, but I’m pretty sure
that my adsl connection would probably be hosed before
radiant would be, so serving it up with raw apache wouldn’t help me. Do
you have enough bandwidth that the app will be your
bottleneck (or conversely, running it on slow enough a server)? Do you
really expect a 5000 hits/minute traffic surge?

(running ab against pages of various sizes):

With splitting of content from data:
296 bytes 114.18 [#/sec] (mean)
1198 bytes 113.63 [#/sec] (mean)
10200 bytes 106.94 [#/sec] (mean)
100202 bytes 82.09 [#/sec] (mean)
1000204 bytes 23.87 [#/sec] (mean)

Using mod_xsendfile:
296 bytes 111.72 [#/sec] (mean)
1198 bytes 111.66 [#/sec] (mean)
10200 bytes 113.44 [#/sec] (mean)
100202 bytes 102.71 [#/sec] (mean)
1000204 bytes 52.12 [#/sec] (mean)

And for comparison, serving html directly with apache:
296 bytes 822.34 [#/sec] (mean)
1198 bytes 811.40 [#/sec] (mean)
10200 bytes 787.08 [#/sec] (mean)
100202 bytes 592.11 [#/sec] (mean)
1000204 bytes 196.89 [#/sec] (mean)

Dan.

Hi Sean,

On 18 Apr 2007, at 15:29, Sean C. wrote:

I’ve collected information about all the changes to Radiant in the
last
250+ commits and summarized them on my blog. Please read:

http://seancribbs.com/tech/2007/04/18/whats-new-in-radiant-0-6

That’s a really informative article, thanks for putting it together.

Jon

Jim G. wrote:

lost.
I agree with you Jim, and would accept a patch that fixes this.


John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com

Nice job on the updates. I’m very happy to see optimistic locking.
Before submitting a ticket, I wanted to check with the list to see if
the optimistic locking is working the way everyone expects.
If a page has been edited, it warns you of the problem, but it wipes
your changes and displays what is in the database. In my mind, it
should warn you, but not remove any change that you made.

My worry is that person1 could spend time editing some particular
text, and while they are doing that, person2 goes in and fixes a
typo. After hitting save person1 sees the error, but all her work is
lost.

-Jim

If a page has been edited, it warns you of the problem, but it wipes
your changes and displays what is in the database. In my mind, it
should warn you, but not remove any change that you made.

It warns you, and displays the changes that you just made… The changes
are there, it’s just that you have no way to save them - you
need to copy them out to somewhere else and then reload the page and try
again.

(at least, that’s how I wrote it to work - intention and implementation
may differ)

Dan.

The new Ruby site runs on Radiant, and was slashdotted, with
(absolutely) no apparent ill-effects.
http://radiantcms.org/blog/2006/11/11/ra/

Also, Radiant already does B) as I understand it.

On 4/19/07, Jim G. [email protected] wrote:

My worry is that person1 could spend time editing some particular
text, and while they are doing that, person2 goes in and fixes a
typo. After hitting save person1 sees the error, but all her work is
lost.

Without diffs and/or merges, someone always has to lose their work :confused:

implementation may differ)

Dan.

In my instance, it doesn’t show the changes I just made, it shows the
changes that were made to the database (by someone else); the changes
I made are lost.

Dan, do you have time to look into this? I’m no ruby/rails expert
yet, but I’m happy to help. I’m going to familiarize myself with the
code…

-Jim

In my instance, it doesn’t show the changes I just made, it
shows the
changes that were made to the database (by someone else); the
changes
I made are lost.

Dan, do you have time to look into this? I’m no ruby/rails expert
yet, but I’m happy to help. I’m going to familiarize myself with the
code…

Just checked in a change that should fix this.

Dan.